“Fetishist,” he snapped at her, with fury. “We process a hundred of you a day, you and your leather and chain mail and dildoes. God.” He stood breathing noisily, feeling himself shake.

Yawning, Alys slid from the couch, stood straight upright and stretched her long, slender arms. “I’m glad it’s evening,” she said airily, her eyes squeezed shut. “Now I can go home and go to bed.”

“How do you plan to get out of here?” he demanded. But he knew. Every time the same ritual unfolded. The ascent tube for “secluded” political prisoners got brought into use: it led from his extreme north office to the roof, hence to the quibble field. Alys came and went that way, his key breezily in hand. “Someday,” he said to her darkly, “an officer will be using the tube for a legitimate purpose, and he’ll run into you …

“And what would he do?” She massaged his short-cropped gray hair. “Tell me, please, sir. Muff-dive me into panting contrition?”

“One look at you with that sated expression on your face—”

“They know I’m your sister.”

Buckman said harshly, “They know because you’re always coming in here for one reason or another or no damn reason at all.”

Perching knees up on the edge of a nearby desk, Alys eyed him seriously. “It really bothers you.”

“Yes, it really bothers me.”

“That I come here and make your job unsafe.”

“You can’t make my job unsafe,” Buckman said. “I’ve got only five men over me, excluding the national director, and all of them know about you and they can’t do anything. So you can do what you want.” Thereupon he stormed out of the north office, down the dull corridor to the larger suite where he did most of his work. He tried to avoid looking at her.

“But you carefully closed the door,” Alys said, sauntering after him, “so that that Herbert Blame or Mame or Maine or whatever it is wouldn’t see me.”

“You,” Buckman said, “are repellent to a natural man.”

“Is Maime natural? How do you know? Have you screwed him?”

“If you don’t get out of here,” he said quietly, facing her across two desks. “I’ll have you shot. So help me God.”

She shrugged her muscular shoulders. And smiled.

“Nothing scares you,” he said, accusingly. “Since your brain operation. You systematically, deliberately, had all your human centers removed. You’re now a”—he struggled to find the words; Alys always hamstrung him like this, even managed to abolish his ability to use words—“you,” he said chokingly, “are a reflex machine that diddles itself endlessly like a rat in an experiment. You’re wired into the pleasure nodule of your brain and you push the switch five thousand times an hour every day of your life when you’re not sleeping. It’s a mystery to me why you bother to sleep; why not diddle yourself a full twenty-four hours a day?”

He waited, but Alys said nothing.

“Someday,” he said, “one of us will die.”

“Oh?” she said, raising a thin green eyebrow.

“One of us,” Buckman said, “will outlive the other. And that one will rejoice.”

The pol-line phone on the larger desk buzzed. Reflexively, Buckman picked it up. On the screen McNulty’s rumpled hyped-up features appeared. “Sorry to bother you, General Buckman, but I just got a call from one of my staff. There’s no record in Omaha of a birth certificate ever being issued for a Jason Taverner.”

Patiently, Buckman said, “Then it’s an alias.”

“We took fingerprints, voiceprints, footprints, EEG prints. We sent them to One Central, to the overall data bank in Detroit. No match-up. Such fingerprints, footprints, voiceprints, EEG prints, don’t exist in any data banks on earth.” McNulty tugged himself upright and wheezed apologetically, “Jason Taverner doesn’t exist.”

8

Jason Taverner did not, at the moment, wish to return to Kathy. Nor, he decided, did he want to try Heather Hart once again. He tapped his coat pocket; he still had his money, and, because of the police pass, he could feel free to travel anywhere. A pol-pass was a passport to the entire planet; until they APB-ed on him he could travel as far as he wanted, including unimproved areas such as specific, acceptable jungle-infested islands in the South Pacific. There they might not find him for months, not with what his money would buy in an open-area spot such as that.

I’ve got three things going for me, he realized. I’ve got money, good looks, and personality. Four things: I also have forty-two years of experience as a six.

An apartment.

But, he thought, if I rent an apartment, the rotive manager will be required by law to take my fingerprints; they’ll be routinely mailed to Pol-Dat Central … and when the police have discovered that my ID cards are fakes, they’ll find they have a direct line to me. So there goes that.

What I need, he said to himself, is to find someone who already has an apartment. In their name, with their prints.

And that means another girl.

Where do I find such a one? he asked himself, and had the answer already on his tongue: at a first-rate cocktail lounge. The kind many women go to, with a three-man combo playing fob jazzy, preferably blacks. Well dressed.

Am I well enough dressed, though? he wondered, and took a good look at his silk suit under the steady white-and-red light of a huge AAMCO sign. Not his best but nearly so … but wrinkled. Well, in the gloom of a cocktail lounge it wouldn’t show.

He hailed a cab, and presently found himself quibbling toward the more acceptable part of the city to which he was accustomed—accustomed, at least, during the most recent years of his life, his career When he had reached the very top.

A club, he thought, where I’ve appeared. A club I really know. Know the maître d’, the hatcheck girl, the flower girl … unless they, like me, are somehow now changed.

But as yet it appeared that nothing but himself had changed. His circumstances. Not theirs.

The Blue Fox Room of the Hayette Hotel in Reno. He had played there a number of times; he knew the layout and the staff backward and forward.

To the cab he said, “Reno.”

Beautifully, the cab peeled off in a great swooping righthand motion; he felt himself going with it, and enjoyed it. The cab picked up speed: they had entered a virtually unused air corridor, and the upper velocity limit was perhaps as high as twelve hundred m.p.h.

“I’d like to use the phone,” Jason said.

The left wall of the cab opened and a picphone slid out, cord twisted in a baroque 1oop.

He knew the number of the Blue Fox Room by heart; he dialed it, waited, heard a click and then a mature male voice saying, “Blue Fox Room, where Freddy Hydrocephalic is appearing in two shows nightly, at eight and at twelve; only thirty dollars’ cover charge and girls provided while you watch. May I help you?”

“Is this good old Jumpy Mike?” Jason said. “Good old Jumpy Mike himself?”

“Yes, this certainly is.” The formality of the voice ebbed. “Who am I speaking to, may I ask?” A warm chuckle.

Taking a deep breath, Jason said, “This is Jason Taverner.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Taverner.” Jumpy Mike sounded puzzled. “Right now at the moment I can’t quite—”

“It’s been a long time,” Jason interrupted. “Can you give me a table toward the front of the room—”

“The Blue Fox Room is completely sold out, Mr. Taverner,” Jumpy Mike rumbled in his fat way. “I’m very sorry.”

“No table at all?” Jason said. “At any price?”

“Sorry, Mr. Taverner, none.” The voice faded in the direction of remoteness. “Try us in two weeks.” Good old Jumpy Mike hung up.

Silence.

Jesus shit Christ, Jason said to himself. “God,” he said aloud. “God damn it.” His teeth ground against one another, sending sheets of pain through his trigeminal nerve.

“New instructions, big fellow?” the cab asked tonelessly.

“Make it Las Vegas,” Jason grated. I’ll try the Nellie Melba Room of the Drake’s Arms, he decided. Not too long ago he had had good luck there, at a time when Heather Hart had been fulfilling an engagement in Sweden. A reasonable number of reasonably high class chicks hung out there, gambling, drinking, listening to the entertainment, getting it on. It was worth a try, if the Blue Fox Room—and the others like it—were closed to him. After all, what could he lose?